French fries are pretty versatile, but as far as the thin, crispy variety goes, it's hard to get them better than your local fast food joint. Food blog Serious Eats shows us how to duplicate McDonald's french fries at home.

This isn't some half-baked recreation of an existing commercial product, either—blogger and serious fry enthusiast J. Kenji Lopez-Alt went to great lengths to duplicate McDonalds' fries, from doing deep research to actually tricking a McDonald's into giving him frozen fries to reverse engineer. While the main article is long (albeit quite entertaining), in the end the recipe boils down to just a few choice ingredients: potatoes, distilled white vinegar, and peanut oil.

The real key to these fries, besides cutting them super thinly, is to fry them twice—once for about 50 seconds, and then again a half hour later for a few minutes. It may seem like a lot of trouble, but you can't beat the freshness of making them right at home, nor the convenience of being able to freeze the cut potatoes and cook them whenever you want. Hit the link for the full article and recipe.